Thursday, 30 April 2015

One of
the recurring themes of the game, in retrospect, was travel. We had
agreed that the game was to be a globetrotting adventure in the Indiana
Jones mold, rather than an extended expedition to a single exotic
locale, or a tale of pulpy masked heroes
fighting crime in the shadows of a big American city, and almost every
episode had the player characters visiting a new port of call: Shanghai.
Hong Kong. Cairo. London. Rome and the Vatican. New York. San
Francisco. Rio. Buenos Aires. Virtually no corner of
the globe went unexplored, and that meant that as GM, I had to
constantly be painting in new pieces of setting.

Wednesday, 29 April 2015

With
Dr. Song in place as the nominal villain of the piece, until it became
clear that others were even more “Sinister”, the globetrotting adventure
was ready to begin. Much of my early work was very uncertain, because
although I knew that the campaign
would begin in Shanghai (a setting so vivid that I could have run the
whole game there) I wasn’t sure where the players would go from there.
With Rob’s character Su Li motivated to thwart the plans of her evil
father, all I needed to do was dangle his latest
plot in front of her to drive the action. And Dr. Song, of course, was
after the titular Seven Stars of Atlantis: fabulous gemstones rumoured
to have magical powers and a connection to the lost continent itself.

Tuesday, 28 April 2015

There is a melancholy that comes with the end of a campaign, even
one that’s been long and satisfying. Maybe the longer and more
satisfying the game is, the harder it is to let it go. We’re all junkies
for stories. We get tangled up in the lives of our
cast of characters, their problems and their passions, and we wonder
where their lives will take them next.

Sunday, 5 April 2015

I know, it's been a while. Once again, the working world has caught up to me and The Blogging has suffered. I've got a few things I've been meaning to talk about here -- including my noodling around for a couple of weeks building a Harry Potter hack using FATE ACCELERATED -- but let's get back to business with a little review.